E Marketing 6 : Market Segmentation Online : 1.Basic Markets

There are two tiers of marketing strategy 1. Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning or STP Marketing. Second is 4Ps with CRM strategy (We will discuss in the future.) Segmenting is the first of those 1st tier strategies.

Lets discuss online market segmentation.

 

First post about segmenting is about the three basic markets that both sell and buy to each other. They are Businesses, Governments and consumers.

1. Business Market
Contains the businesses and institutions. In the most biggest market in internet because many firms are present online than consumers. This is why B2B activity online is only second to B2C.
For e.g.

1. DHL - maintains a database of its' corporate clients. And the clients can login to their companies account and see where their package is.

2. A web designing company will directly target the Business Market. 

2. Government Market

 

This is applicable to many developed countries, where governments purchase online. Not very much applicable to Sri Lanka yet. But take a country like US - US govt. is the worlds largest buyer of goods and service (http://www.sba.gov/contractingopportunities/index.html)

But businesses willing to target govt market will have unique challenges like rules,paperwork..etc.

Joke - Knowing someone with surname "Rajapakshe" can be of help in Sri Lanka, Still you have to be careful with govt, since we all know about what happened to Hi-Corp deal.

3. Consumer Market

Is the biggest ever market. And the market potential is unlimited. Majority of products target this market for its capacity. The success stories of online marketing directed at consumers are Amazon, Ebay, 1-800 Flowers and Kapruka, Topjobs.lk and gossiplankanews.

We will next talk about examples to all these three markets selling to each other. i.e. B2B, B2C, B2G, C2B, C2G, C2C - so on and so forth examples.